


despite better judgment

by gizkas



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Criminal Jyn, F/M, Meeting in the ER, Surgeon Cassian, Tumblr fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 05:03:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9306494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gizkas/pseuds/gizkas
Summary: “There were three concussions, a broken wrist, four dislocated shoulders, five lacerations-”Cassian turned another sheet on the patient’s chart, looking up with tired disbelief. He must have heard Kay wrong. “That’s too many shoulders.”“No, Dr. Andor. These are the injuries the patient has inflicted since her arrival.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt: meeting in the ER AU :o)

The coffee ran out in a slow, steaming stream into his flimsy styrofoam cup. Cassian lifted it up to eye level and immediately regretted it, seeing black specks from an unchanged filter settling on the bottom of the amber-colored liquid. 

 

“Which intern is in charge of this?” He muttered in a voice gone raspy from lack of sleep. Alliance Hospital was understaffed on the best of days, and this week was far from it. 

 

“That would be Biggs Darklighter,” came a perpetually monotone voice from behind him. After four years of working together, Cassian still wasn’t sure if Kay T. So’s inflections were programmed or a default state of being.

 

He turned around. And looked up. The trauma resident was freakishly tall and spindly. “Fire him,” he said, half genuine. 

 

“I haven’t the pay grade for managerial matters.” Kay wordlessly handed him a chart. “We’re in need of a surgical consultant.”

 

“You and half the hospital.” But Cassian began to flip through the papers neatly arranged on the clipboard. 

 

“There were three concussions, a broken wrist, four dislocated shoulders, five lacerations-”

 

Cassian turned another sheet on the patient’s chart, looking up with tired disbelief. He must have heard Kay wrong. “That’s too many shoulders.”

 

The tall resident slowed in his steps, his expression as always a completely blank slate. “No, Dr. Andor,” he stated in all his divorced enthusiasm. “These are the injuries the patient has inflicted since her arrival.”

 

He stopped. Clearly he needed to reread the chart. “What was this patient brought in for, again?” 

 

Kay, as always, did not blink. But Cassian had grown used to the night shift doctor’s more off-putting mannerisms. “Blunt trauma.” 

 

“What kind of blunt trauma?”

 

“Mild to severe.”

 

He counted to five before responding, as was suggested by the hospital’s director, Mon Mothma. “As in context, Dr. So.”

 

“Ah.” Kay took a moment to think about it. “Criminal, from what I understand.”

 

Cassian frowned. He pulled back the curtain. On the bed lay a woman with smudged make-up and one hand resting lightly against her abdomen. Her lip was split, and he could see the blossoming of an impressive bruise over her cheek--likely fractured.

 

Her other hand was handcuffed to the railing of the hospital bed. She looked up at his entrance, chin tilted and green eyes boring a hole into his forehead.

 

“Yes.” Kay muttered from behind his shoulder. “Definitely criminal.”

 

“Who’re you?” The woman snarled.

 

She was either still in a confrontational mood, or was suffering an injury that impaired cognitive functions. Cassian, based on the list of damages, was going to assume a high probability for  _ both.  _ Too tired to foster up a proper bedside manner, he stood above her with the chart, pulling a pencil from his scrubs pocket.

 

“Any allergies or adverse reactions to anesthesia or medication?” He intoned in the actual voice of death. 

 

She felt her eyes scanning him. They settled on his face, before landing on the name neatly embroidered on the less-than-pristine white coat. “No,” she bit out. “What happened to the men in the waiting room?”

 

He sent her a dark look, less than amused. “We apparently need to treat half of them. Pain on a scale of 1 to 10?”

 

“I need to get out of here,” she demanded. It was clear that her attention was less on the wound on her side and more on the men she somehow managed to hospitalize in a hospital. 

 

“You can explain that to the police.” Cassian stepped forward. “I need to feel your stomach, are you going to be hostile?”

 

Her lips tugged into a sneer. “I’m always hostile.”

 

“Empirical observation would confirm that statement,” Kay agreed, taking his own notes. 

 

“Are you going to trust me to provide your medical care? Yes or no.” He did not have time for bullshit.

 

She grit her teeth. Her skin was pale, sweat plastering hair to her forehead and neck. She rolled the wrist attached to the railing, the cuff making light clanks, before drawing a deep inhale. “ _ Fine.”  _

 

Cassian’s mind went into acute mode. “Lift your shirt.” And, only because she seemed to be in a considerable amount of pain: “Please.”

 

She rolled up the edge of it with her free hand. 

 

_ Shit,  _ Cassian thought immediately. “What happened?”

 

His fingers run over the skin of her abdomen. It felt rock hard underneath his touch, and was clearly distended. 

 

“Baseball bat,” she said flatly. “From one of those men in the lobby.”

 

“Kay, her blood pressure?”

 

“Low.” The resident looked up at her monitors and let out a slight sigh, as if they had disappointed him. “Now lower.”

 

Cassian gave a grim nod, annoyance filtering to the back of his mind in the face of what he suspected was a ruptured spleen. “Any nausea, light-headedness, or blurred vision?”

 

“...a bit.”

 

_ A bit.  _ As a surgeon, he had little patience for liars. “Dr. So, prep an operating room immediately.”

 

“No Computed Tomography?”

 

“No.” And, for the patient’s benefit: “No CT scan. We need to move.”

 

“Something the matter?” The patient asked, with the voice of someone accustomed to bad news.

 

“Your spleen is ruptured, we’re going to perform an emergency surgery to remove it.” His eyes met hers, and he was surprised to find that her main response was still  _ anger  _ from whatever led to her arrival in this ER. “Are there any pre-existing conditions I should know about? Anything in your family medical history?”

 

She snorted, but shook her head. She was looking paler, so he was surprised once again when her non-cuffed hand grabbed tightly onto his forearm. 

 

“ _ Don’t, _ ” she rasped. “Leave me alone.”

 

He stared down at her, trying to parse the meaning of her statement. “You’ll be watched by staff after the surgery-”

 

“No!” She swallowed. “Krennic’s people might kill me.” Her expression took on an edge, half-desperate. “Do you know who he is?”

 

Assumed leader of the Imperialists, the closest thing Coruscant had to an organized crime syndicate. With her arm outstretched, the sleeve of her green shirt tugged up. Cassian saw the bottom half of a tattoo that signified the Partisans. 

 

So she was in a gang. The revelation didn’t change anything about his initial perceptions, just another checkmark in the boxes he was drawing of her in his mind. The woman looked at him, and he was yet again taken off-guard when her voice became  _ pleading. _

 

“I came here because I heard rumors about this hospital. Are they true?”

 

Rumors. Alliance Hospital was full of them. But there was only one that would matter to someone like her. That they were an official front for the  _ very  _ unofficial Rebellion. If she was a Partisan, that at least made her an enemy of the mutual enemy. 

 

Cassian managed to soften his voice as best he could.

 

“We’ll take care of you,” he promised.

 

Her fingers tighten around his arm. “Don’t let me out of your sight,” she begged.

 

He rested his hand over hers for a moment. Let her feel its reassurance. Before he pulled it off him so he could start prepping her bed for transport to the OR. 

 

Cassian gave her a final nod. “I won’t.”

 

“Unless he blinks,” Kay supplied, unhelpful.

 

\--

 

The surgery is routine. And Cassian values his word above a lot of other things, so instead of sneaking a few hours of sleep in the on-call room, he sat in the chair next to her bed. Exhaustion always wins over posterity, and so he dragged out another chair to rest his feet on. It’s been a thirty-six hour shift of pure hell, in no small part due to a gang brawl in the ER lobby.

 

His tired eyes go to her. He’d pulled her records. Jyn Erso. This wasn’t her first trip to the ER for criminal activity. And her emergency contact was Saw fucking Gerrera.

 

But she was smart enough to make up for her recklessness. A man in a white suit had stopped by a few hours ago. He walked in, saw Cassian, and wisely continued walking past. Cassian didn’t know if that was a result of new paranoia Jyn had instilled hin him, or if his presence had legitimately saved her from a hit. He ran a hand through his hair, looked up at the ceiling.

 

It was a long wait until she regained consciousness.

 

“You,” her voice sounds terrible and weak. “Actually stayed.”

 

“Despite better judgment,” he replied in a voice equally terrible. 

 

She let out a low hiss of air that he imagined was an attempt at a snort.  The woman just lost her spleen and still felt the need to put up a front. “Does this mean I have to make you my primary surgeon?”

 

“You have enough surgeries to need a primary one?”

 

“I’m unpopular these days.”

 

That, he believed. 

 

They sat in silence for a few moments, as Jyn no doubt attempted to acclimate to her new situation and Cassian attempted to fight a migraine. Eventually, he heard the clank-clank- _ clank  _ of the handcuff.

 

“So this is still here,” she mused. Her gaze slid to him. “I imagine you’ve called the cops, then.”

 

He stared at the woman, at the cuff. And made a gamble. “It’s either them or Saw Gerrera.”

 

Jyn grimaced, proving his hypothesis correct. “Cops.” 

 

Cassian dropped his feet back to the ground, leaning closer to her bedside. He doesn’t grab her hand, but there was an odd sensation of  _ closeness  _ that somehow felt inappropriate. Despite the waxiness of her face and the split in her lip, Jyn’s eyes were still bright with that barely simmering fire he recognized earlier in the ER.

 

“We’ll observe you for two weeks,” he stated. It’s longer than what’s customary, but Cassian had a thought that he can’t let go of.

 

“Ah. A vacation,” Jyn whispered. The sentiment seemed sincere. 

 

Her arm shifted on the bed, the back of her knuckles grazing over the side of his hand. He stared down at the appendage in confusion, before flexing it.

 

“No fights,” he warned. 

“...no fights,” she compromised.

 

He stared into her eyes, looking for a hint of deception. Unnerved to find none.

 

A knock at the door broke his evaluation. Jyn immediately tensed, but Cassian only nodded at the newcomer.

 

“You asked me to come by?” Bodhi Rook, an orderly, asked from his place at the threshold. He was off-duty, but still in scrubs.

 

“Do you know him?” Jyn asked, the edge from before returning to her tone.

 

“He’s a friend.” Cassian stood, rolling his shoulders and hearing something loud pop in his neck. The rest of the sentence is finished around a yawn. “Who owes me a favor.”

 

“Hi,” Bodhi greeted, lifting his hand in a gesture torn between a salute and wave.

 

“Hi,” Jyn echoed, some but not all of the edge fading.

 

“I’m going to sleep,” Cassian said flatly. He looked down at Jyn. “I’ll be back tomorrow after my rounds. Kay, the tall man with me earlier? Will be replacing Bodhi.” Again he caught his tone going softer, not sure why and not wanting to dig into it. “You won’t be left alone while you’re here.”

 

Jyn visibly swallowed. “Alright.”

 

He nodded, making a slow shamble to the door as Bodhi stepped in and took his chair. He was stretching his arms over his head when he heard her voice call out behind him.

 

“Cassian?”

 

It should be  _ Dr. Andor.  _ But he’s too exhausted to put up a fight at the moment. “What?”

 

“Thank you.” The two words sounded like they’ve never been uttered. “For not leaving.”

 

_ It’s what any surgeon would do,  _ he wanted to start. But that wasn’t true, and they both knew it. So instead of a response, Cassian sent her a last, lingering look before he turned and made his way to Mon Mothma’s office.

 

It was, he suspected, going to be a long two weeks. 


End file.
